Charles Laughton (44 page)

Mitchum, the Bad Father, is similarly endowed with mythic overtones, at once attractive and repulsive, the words
love
and
hate
spelt out on his face, just as they are on his knuckles. ‘Leaning! Leaning! Leaning on the everlasting arm,’ he sings, and, heard in the distance, now closer, now further, it becomes oppressively menacing, all the more so for its neutrality. When the children give him the slip, he becomes momentarily absurd, like a cartoon character, as he stumbles up the stairs, stunned by a collapsing shelf. It’s a Tom-and-Jerry interlude, a child’s revenge on an adult. Later, at the end of the film, when Preacher has been caught and is about to be lynched, John can’t endure the real pain and the real death that Preacher is about to undergo; he throws the precious doll stuffed with ten dollar bills that he’s been keeping from him on the ground, sobbing, ‘Take it, take it.’ And he refuses to testify against him in court. It is in the dreaming child’s terms that he has his reward at the picture’s end: a watch, which gives him magic protection: ‘I ain’t afraid no more! I got a watch that ticks! I got a watch that shines in the dark!’ And then we’re back up in the stars again, Gish exuding love without condition, strength without threat.

These sections, the opening and closing shots, are perhaps the least successful; they are what the film never is elsewhere: sentimental. The stars are partly the cause of that, but the main culprit is the music, elevated and replete with angelic voices of children. It serves a valuable function, in taking the film out of the realistic groove from the very beginning, but the effect is syrupy, not sublime. Otherwise, the score is of the utmost value in creating the overall atmosphere, frequently functioning as a counterpoint to the action, as in the
valse triste
suggested by Cortez for the scene in which Preacher murders Willa (Shelley Winters). The nature music, Honegger-like with its burbling flutes and murmuring strings, is exquisite, and the organisation of the hymns, children’s catches, and songs creates a large part of the film’s texture. Walter Schumann, who composed the music, had performed a similar service for
John Brown’s Body
; his death shortly after the completion of
Night of the Hunter
was a serious loss for music in the movies.

The visual aspect of the film is of course paramount, as it could
hardly
fail to be, the outcome of a collaboration between two supremely visually-oriented artists. Laughton contributed everything he knew by way of pictorial composition; Cortez ensured the intensification of every image. There isn’t an undistinguished frame in the picture; as in Welles’ work, every picture tells a story. The famous A-frame of the roof in Willa’s death room, the image of Preacher hanging upside down in his bunk in the jailhouse, the strange light which plays on Preacher’s face while he tries to ingratiate himself with John, the boat carrying the children gently downstream; this is visual poetry of the most sensuous kind. The abiding impression of the film is its physicality. Sex and nature loom through the film at all points; nature a kind of all-permeating presence, now in the background, now in the foreground, but always palpable, always
there
. Sex, from the first glimpse of Preacher in a strip-club, his eyes clouded with homicidal rage, as the flick-knife in his pocket tears phallically through the cloth, to the intimations of Willa Harper’s nubile longings, the dry and brutal talk of Icey (‘I’ve been married to my Walt for forty years and I swear in all that time I’d just lie there thinking about my canning’) and the all-bursting, uncontainable sexuality of Ruby, one of Lilian Gish’s wards, face painted, lips pouting, irresistibly drawn towards the Preacher. All this sex is somehow threatening, perverted, or disgusting; except, that is, to Gish. Ruby can confess to her: ‘I’ve been bad’. ‘You was looking for
love
, child, the only foolish way you knowed how,’ Gish tells Ruby, ‘we all need love.’ In the market she sees two spooning lovers, and says, with affectionate dismay, ‘
She’ll
be losin’ her mind to a tricky mouth and a full moon, and like as not, I’ll be saddled with the
consequences
.’ Love without conditions; strength without threat. As John makes his way through the adult world of murder, rape, theft, poverty and irrepressible, confusing sex, he finds, in the end, a haven which does not deny the existence of all these things, but is a fortress from which to contend with them. Until this resolution, his attitude to the world, a mixture of wonderment and alienation, seems not unlike his creator’s.

It is interesting to compare Laughton’s astonishing first film with those made by his near-contemporary, fellow actor-director, Laurence Olivier. The hostility between them, which had a few more eruptions yet in it, was as much a matter of principle as of personality. Olivier’s films, especially the Shakespearean trilogy, are brilliant achievements, exciting, dramatic, witty. They are in no way personal, however, and have an extrovert energy which is exhilarating but theatrical. They borrow shamelessly from other films (the famous
arrow-shooting
sequence from
Aleksandr Nevsky
, for example). Laughton didn’t
borrow
from Griffith; in some mysterious neo-Platonic sense, their souls united to create something unique. Laughton’s film is filled in every frame by his preoccupations, by his poetry. Olivier’s film is brilliantly done, Laughton’s intensely imagined.

Reviewing the film on its first appearance in France, François Truffaut wrote: ‘it makes us fall in love again with an experimental cinema that truly experiments, and a cinema of discovery that, in fact, discovers:’ Another way of putting this is that the creative moment remains present in the finished result, what Brecht had called ‘the active creative element, the making of art’. That is what had frequently distinguished Laughton’s performances in the past; it is supremely true of this film. ‘Every day,’ wrote Cortez, ‘the marvellous team that made that picture would meet and discuss the next day’s work. It was designed from day to day in fullest detail, so that the details seemed fresh, fresher than if we had done the whole thing in advance.’

Laughton, had found, it would seem, his métier. Everything in his experience contributed to it: his love and knowledge of art, his gifts in shaping a script, his ability with actors, his deep immersion in all the process of movie-making. The man who loved words but could not write, the man who loved art but could not paint, the man who had authority but preferred to work with collaborators, had found his brush, his pen, his team. He had been brought to it, but once connected with the process, all he needed was encouragement and enthusiasm, and he would surely wreak wonders.

Alas, it was a flop. Critically it did moderately well – misunderstood, treated as a thriller which wasn’t quite thrilling enough, or a parable of which the moral was none too clear – but commercially it was a disaster. As far as the box office is concerned, Paul Gregory was inclined to attribute its failure to United Artists’ favouring of the
next
Mitchum movie,
Not as a Stranger
(which in fact he had started filming even before
Night of the Hunter
was completed), a much bigger production altogether, five million dollars against
Night of the Hunter
’s seven hundred and fifty thousand for a thirty six day shoot. It is easy to see, however, that
Night of the Hunter
would never be a popular hit. Not only is the subject-matter complex, the movie itself has a poetic and imagistic density which make it somewhat indigestible on first viewing. It benefits enormously from being seen twice, or more – something that can be expected of no popular audience; in fact, it
would
be correct to say it
needs
to be seen twice. It doesn’t grab you by the lapel; it tries to suck you in. Both Billy Wilder and Truffaut drew attention to the inadvisability of starting one’s career as a director with such a film: ‘The film runs counter to the rules of commercialism; it will probably be Laughton’s single experience as a director,’ wrote the Frenchman. Another man, however, might have risen above the disappointment; Laughton was neither of the age nor the temperament to do so. It broke his heart. He was, in the words of more than one witness, destroyed by it. After the triumph of
The Caine Mutiny
, it was humiliating to fail in this way; he had put all of himself into it, and it was not wanted. From now on there would be no more great projects. Gregory (ever avid for best-sellers) bought the rights to Norman Mailer’s war novel,
The Naked and the Dead
, for him; Laughton went through all the motions, but his heart was clearly not in it. His skill and his application were unimpaired. Mailer wrote eloquently of what he’d learned from him: ‘He gave me, in fact, a marvellous brief education in the problems of a movie director, as he would explain to me, sometimes patiently, sometimes at the edge of his monumental impatience, how certain scenes which worked in the book just weren’t feasible for the movie.’ But the subject was not one to which Laughton warmed. He worked with Stanley Cortez on ideas for the photography, even sent him to Hawaii, to scout locations; and he hired the Sanders brothers to work with him on the script. Their work, Terry Sanders said, was ‘leisurely’: starting at 10.30 a.m., they would read a bit of the novel, follow a couple of tangents, he would read them a bit of Dickens, perhaps, or Thomas Wolfe, then it would be time for lunch which Heidl the cook would prepare for them, an enormous, many-coursed banquet, after which more readings, and then it was 5 p.m. and time for Martinis, and then the day was over. ‘After a while it dawned on me that Charles didn’t
want
to finish the script. I felt that we were just sitting around as an audience.’ It was ‘a great experience’, and ‘an education’, but after six months the sense of aimlessness became unbearable to the brothers: they had their own films to make. One has the impression that as far as Laughton was concerned, it could have gone on for ever. After the brothers resigned from the project, Gregory had backer trouble: how long would it be before there was anything to show for the now nearly half a million dollars which had been spent? Charles produced a script, thought by Gregory to be ‘brilliant, absolutely brilliant’. Mailer approved of it, too; but it was clearly far, far too long. It would take, he said, another year before a shooting script was ready. The backer then handed the
draft
to his chum, George Sidney, late of
Young Bess
, and
that
towering figure’s opinion was that it was no good, and would cost $20 million to shoot. And that was that. (Gregory later sold the property, with a new script by the Brothers Sanders, to Warner Brothers, and Raoul Walsh shot it, and it was worse than no good.)

Gregory claims that the backer’s withdrawal was a relief; the feeling is that it was a relief for Charles too. Is there an element of Wellesianism here? A Promethean anxiety, the dread of completion? Probably. But also it seemed that with Charles, the more he understood a thing, the more difficult it got. Mailer wrote of Laughton’s work on the script: ‘I don’t think I ever met an actor before or since whose mind was so powerful and fine as Laughton’s. No aspect of the novel passed by him unnoticed … he wanted me to explain every single last point he did not clearly comprehend for himself.’ It is admirable to be so thorough, but there comes a point where perfectionism is procrastination’s other name.

It is interesting, though not necessarily related, that it was at this moment that Charles suddenly and irrevocably broke with Paul Gregory. The pretext was apparently a personal one: Gregory had boasted to Charles’ then boyfriend that he could get anything out of Charles: if he wanted a car, he could even get that. Laughton went, with cold rage, to his attorney and dissolved the partnership there and then. He never spoke to Gregory again.

The imputation that Charles was Gregory’s poodle, that like Uriah Heep he could manipulate him into any shape he liked, must have been very vexing, of course; but theirs was a stormy and openly recriminatory relationship. Charles’ pride was considerable, and this may have proved the final unacceptable affront to it. He knew that he was Gregory’s main asset, and perhaps wanted to remind him of who needed whom. This too would be fully understandable. What was also true was that Gregory had been the organising energy behind Laughton’s professional life for five unceasingly active years: project after project he’d initiated, prodding him, goading him, bribing him with promises of large financial rewards. At the same time, he’d been the voice of his conscience, challenging him to greater heights, reminding him of his great gifts and reproaching him for squandering them. Gregory behaved exactly, in fact, as if those gifts were his own. And it is true, he was responsible for all the artistic successes of Laughton’s
anni mirabiles
, the early fifties. Without him, they would never have happened. He had, as he often boasted, rescued Laughton from a backwater. But what if Laughton didn’t want to be rescued?
He’d
been happy teaching – that ‘ego-trip’, as Gregory called it. The reading tours were a great inspiration, of course, and lucrative; but Laughton had come to hate them. He carried on with them, nevertheless, for the rest of his life: they were after all, a form of teaching. But the constant draining labour of creation, the pressure to produce results! Paul was the spur: remove the spur, and he could get on with what he most loved: contemplation, paintings, reading out loud, teaching. Many of these activities could be pursued in the presence of handsome young men who would also – sometimes for a small consideration, sometimes not – have no objection to being made love to. The rest was too exhausting.

And so, Paul Gregory went.

Almost Legitimate Again

LIFE WENT ON
, of course: there was life after Gregory. First, he was asked by David Lean to play the character that Alec Guinness eventually played in
Bridge on the River Kwai
. Lean denies this, on the not unreasonable grounds that it would have been absurd for that part to cast an actor of Charles’ bulk; besides, he always wanted Guinness for the part. Elsa Lanchester, however, recalls much agonising over the decision on Laughton’s part, from which we can conclude at least that he
thought
he had been offered the role. His reasons for turning it down, she says, were to do with the extreme discomfort involved: what would once have been the most persuasive reason for accepting.